Israeli settlers denied allegations Tuesday that they flooded a Palestinian olive grove with sewage from an illegal settlement in the occupied West Bank.

Residents of Deir Al-Hatab, a Palestinian village in the Nablus district, said some 660 olive trees were destroyed by runoff from factories connected to the Elon Moreh settlement.

Abdul Kareem Hussein, the village mayor, told Ma%u2019an that villagers found wide-scale destruction at the olive grove when they were granted permission to visit the lands. Some 220 olive trees were burned, Hussein said, and about 400 were soaked in sewage.

Gershon Mesika, director of the Shomron Regional Council and resident of Elon Moreh, said: "The true culprits of this environmental vandalism, spilling raw sewage into the environment in the area, are the residents of neighboring Arab villages who lack purifying systems.

"In an effort to enhance local cooperation, we have offered the Arab villages to connect to our system. The villagers have not accepted our offer due to their fear of threat and retaliation from the Palestinian Authority for cooperating with the neighboring Jewish communities."

Hussein, the mayor, said the 2,500 residents in Deir Al-Hatab are only allowed to visit confiscated lands three or four times each year. He said 60 percent of villagers rely almost entirely on income from the olive harvests. He condemned the "continuous aggression of the settlers, especially in the olive harvest season."

Hussein called on the PA to step in and protect this season's harvest or compensate for losses.

Citizens in Deir Al-Hatab village, Nablus district, were stunned at the sight of 200 of their olive trees damaged in the fields after Jewish settlers poured sewage water from the nearby Allon Moreh settlement into their land.

The citizens said on Tuesday that the settlers usually discharge polluted water from factories of canned meat and spices into their land, which had already destroyed 500 dunums of their cultivated land lots.

They said that the Israeli occupation authority had told them a long time ago that no more sewage water would be allowed to flow into their land but the contrary was happening. They charged the settlers with intentionally planning such aggressive acts to drive the citizens out of their land and annex them to the settlement.Village says settlement runoff destroyed olive grove

Israeli settlers denied allegations Tuesday that they flooded a Palestinian olive grove with sewage from an illegal settlement in the occupied West Bank.

Residents of Deir Al-Hatab, a Palestinian village in the Nablus district, said some 660 olive trees were destroyed by runoff from factories connected to the Elon Moreh settlement.

Abdul Kareem Hussein, the village mayor, told Ma’an that villagers found wide-scale destruction at the olive grove when they were granted permission to visit the lands. Some 220 olive trees were burned, Hussein said, and about 400 were soaked in sewage.

Gershon Mesika, director of the Shomron Regional Council and resident of Elon Moreh, said: "The true culprits of this environmental vandalism, spilling raw sewage into the environment in the area, are the residents of neighboring Arab villages who lack purifying systems.

"In an effort to enhance local cooperation, we have offered the Arab villages to connect to our system. The villagers have not accepted our offer due to their fear of threat and retaliation from the Palestinian Authority for cooperating with the neighboring Jewish communities."

Hussein, the mayor, said the 2,500 residents in Deir Al-Hatab are only allowed to visit confiscated lands three or four times each year. He said 60 percent of villagers rely almost entirely on income from the olive harvests. He condemned the "continuous aggression of the settlers, especially in the olive harvest season."

Hussein called on the PA to step in and protect this season's harvest or compensate for losses.

A group of fundamentalist Jewish settlers attacked on Saturday a group of nonviolent protestors who demanded Israel to reopen the Al Shuhada Street, in the southern West Bank city of Hebron. The settlers hurled stones at the protestors and sprayed them with waste-water.

The Youth Coalition Against settlements organizes weekly protests against the occupation and settlements while dozens of Israeli and international peace activists also participate in these protests.

On Saturday, the protestors, accompanied by delegates of a French solidarity group that includes mayors and officials, held their nonviolent protest and carried signs in English, French, Arabic and Hebrew, calling on Israel to open the Al Shuhada street and to remove the settlers.

They also demanded freedom of movement to all resident especially since Israel designates certain areas in Hebron as Jewish only.

As the protestors marched in the Old City of Hebron, settlers of the Avraham Avino illegal colony attacked the protestors by hurling stones at them and by spraying them with waste-water.

The settlement is located in the Vegetables Market that was taken over by the settlers and the army since 1994 and became a no entry zone to the Palestinians.

The protestors also marched towards a gate installed by the army to seal one of the roads that lead to Al Shuhada street, near Khan Shahin area, and demanded Israel to open all closed roads and to lift the illegal restrictions on the freedom of movement of the local Palestinians.

The head of the French organization stated that by touring in Hebron, he and his comrades, managed to observe the high price the Palestinians are paying due to the existence of settlements and the occupation.

16 july 2010

Israeli settlements have been dumping untreated waste directly into a sewage canal that runs through the occupied West Bank, affecting Palestinian villages along its banks.

The hazard posed is compounded by the dumping of toxic chemical waste on agricultural land, with villagers reporting a rash of skin diseases and respiratory problems.

The Israeli government has banned plans by the Palestinian Authority to build pipes and pumps to treat and divert wastewater away from the affected villages.

A vineyard in Beit Ummar village flooded with sewage from a nearby Israeli settlement

Residents of this Palestinian village refuse to buy the idea that the flood of raw sewage from the adjacent Israeli settlement of Kfar Etzion, that destroyed vineyards and contaminated their drinking water, was an accident.

The Israeli Civil Administration, which administers the occupied West Bank, claims the spillage was the result of an accidental power malfunction which caused excess settlement sewage to overflow onto Palestinian land. “This was no mistake,” said a British activist who has been documenting life in the village for several months. “The pipe was deliberately unscrewed by hand so that the sewage would spill over into Beit Ummar. That has nothing to do with an electricity cut,” he told IPS. Villagers standing near a completely destroyed 70,000 square-meter vineyard belonging to the Sabarneh family said they believe it was a deliberate act of sabotage and part of a concerted campaign by the settlers to harass their Palestinian neighbors and vandalize their property. Beit Ummar has been the target of a number of Israeli military raids at night last month. Activists who have been organizing nonviolent protests against the expropriation of their land for the settlements have been arrested and the village blockaded. In a similar incident last week the Palestinian village of Bruqin, in the northern West Bank, was flooded with sewage from the nearby Ariel settlement, causing contamination of underground water and springs and damaging crops. These incidents are part of a larger problem of scarce water resources where a Palestinian population of 2.5 million survives on 17 percent of the West Bank’s main underground aquifer. The remaining water is channelled towards the West Bank’s (including East Jerusalem) 500,000 Israeli settlers, and into Israel proper. The water shortage is compounded by the lack of wastewater treatment plants and inefficient treatment of waste and sewage in the Palestinian territory which fouls its water sources. Israeli rights group B’Tselem released a study last year called “Foul Play: Neglect of wastewater treatment in the West Bank.” According to the organization, more than 90 percent of Palestinian wastewater is not treated while only 20 percent of Palestinian homes, primarily in towns and cities, are connected to sewerage systems. Furthermore, only 81 of 121 illegal Israeli settlements are connected to wastewater treatment facilities. More than half of the settlements’ treatment plants are too small to treat waste effectively and are ill-equipped to handle the burgeoning settler population. The result is continual technical breakdowns and sewage overflow. Most of the settlements are situated on ridges and hilltops so sewage flows down towards the Palestinian villages and towns in the valleys below, contaminating their drinking water supplies and destroying their crops. The Israeli settlers are not affected by this as they are connected to Israel’s water supply. The planning and building authorities in the settlements and Israeli industrial areas also ignore Jordanian building and planning laws which govern how wastewater is to be treated in the West Bank. The B’Tselem report further outlines the neglect of the territory’s water treatment plants by the Israeli Civil Administration during the decades of occupation and the current difficulties faced by Palestinian Authority (PA) water officials in trying to build new wastewater treatment plants or repair the old ones. There is currently only one wastewater treatment plant operating in the West Bank in Ramallah. Three others have ceased to function and the PA has been unable to repair them or build new ones. The West Bank is divided into Area A, which is under Palestinian control, Area B under joint Palestinian and Israeli control, and Area C which is under full Israeli control. Area C comprises 60 percent of the West Bank. Areas A and B are mostly built up with little free land available. However, in order to move around or build new wastewater treatment plants in Area C Palestinian officials from the PA Environment Authority require building permits from the Israeli Civil Administration. B’Tselem and PA officials complain of the delays these officials face in getting building approval if they get them at all. “There is an enormous amount of red tape and bureaucracy that Palestinian officials have to overcome before they get the permits,” says Eyal Hareuveni, the author of the B’Tselem report. “The Israeli Civil Administration says that the Palestinians don’t provide the necessary detailed building plans as they have been instructed but I think the administration is being deliberately difficult,” Hareuveni told IPS. Issa Moussa from the PA’s Environmental Authority denied that the PA provided insufficient details. “We have the case of wanting to build a new wastewater treatment plant in Tulkarem in the northern West Bank. We provided absolutely everything requested but we were still waiting for a permit,” Moussa told IPS. Other difficulties facing the more efficient handling of wastewater are the restrictions placed on Palestinian movement in the West Bank by the Israeli military. This has led to increased costs for donors who support wastewater projects and who in turn have cut down on their expenditure. A Joint Water Committee between Israel and the PA was established following the Oslo Peace Accord of 1993, to address water issues. One of the disputes between the sides is the Israeli insistence that settlement sewage be connected to future Palestinian wastewater treatment plants. The Palestinians reject this as this implies that the settlements are permanent and say their refusal to approve this condition is one of the reasons for approval being withheld on the construction of wastewater plants. With no higher authority to settle the disagreement the situation will only worsen in the future. “Neither side seems to be making the urgent issue of water and waste treatment a priority,” Hareuveni told IPS.

Most of the Gaza Strip went without electricity for 16 hours today as fuel shortages and alleged internal Palestinian political disputes caused Gaza’s only electric company to shut down completely. If the fuel and electric crisis is not resolved soon, it could spark wide-ranging humanitarian problems across Gaza.

One site of particular concern is the Al-Masheya village of 10,000 people, located a quarter mile downhill from the Beit Lahiya Waste Water Treatment Plant (pictured).

Typically, the sewage water at this plant remains in cement-reinforced "lagoons." However, the plant's 18-foot-deep emergency sand pits are now filling with raw sewage for the first time in almost two years as a result of the electric and fuel shortages. They could easily collapse if they reach capacity.

Three years ago, the collapse of a now-abandoned cesspool at this same plant unleashed an 8 million-gallon sewage tsunami that killed three women and two toddlers in the adjacent village of Al-Nasser. Following the tragedy, the Palestinian Water Authority installed new infrastructure that made it possible to quickly pump large quantities of the plant’s treated sewage to filtration facilities in other parts of Gaza. This negated the need for the dangerous cesspools, which were dismantled or reserved for only emergency overflow.

For the past week, an average of 2 million gallons of sewage water per day has poured from the plant’s cement-reinforced sewage treatment lagoons into two of the three overflow cesspools. As a result of yesterday’s electric blackout, 3.5 million gallons of untreated sewage was redirected to the cesspools in a single day, according to plant operators. Water levels appear to be about three feet high in some places. The third and largest cesspool, which contained more than 660 million gallons of treated sewage before it was drained in August of 2009, remains empty.

Farid Ashour, a sewage management executive, seemed thrilled to have a journalist interested in this subject. He met me within an hour of my inquiry and gave me a tour of the facility to make sure I fully understood the situation. (The picture on the right shows Mr. Ashoud standing beside the second cesspool that is beginning to fill with water. Behind him is the village of Al-Masheya.)

As I covered my nose and tried not to inhale too much sewage-filled air, Mr. Ashour pointed to the third cesspool. “In two or three months, I could once again have [14 feet] high of sewage here,” he said. “If we return to this situation, it will be a catastrophe for the Al-Masheya village. This will be worse than the previous situation, because this is raw sewage.”

Multiple related factors have contributed to this looming crisis. First, the machines that treat the sewage cannot operate without electricity. Moreover, the sewage cannot be pumped to final filtration facilities in other parts of Gaza unless it has reached a certain “quality” level—a process that takes many hours. Without electricity, the water treatment lagoons sit idle and fill to capacity, forcing operators to redirect some sewage into the overflow cesspools. Once the sewage water enters these cesspools, it is difficult and costly to remove.

While the plant contains backup electric generators, these often break and require spare parts that are difficult to import under the Israeli blockade. Additionally, the generators cannot operate without fuel. Under their contract with the Palestinian Authority and the World Bank, plant operators are not permitted to purchase widely available black market fuel that is smuggled into Gaza through tunnels from Egypt.

“[Our contract] is to buy the fuel from the Israeli side,” Ashour explained. “For the last two months, the Israeli side did not allow our fuel to enter Gaza. Once they allow the fuel to enter Gaza, the problem immediately will be solved.” Ashour also mentioned an “easily solvable internal Palestinian issue” that has affected fuel contracts between the World Bank and the local Palestinian authorities.

Meanwhile, the putrid odors emitted from the treatment lagoons are a telling sign that sewage water is not being properly cleaned.

On April 10, the odors reached the entrance to the Balsam Hospital, located one half mile uphill from the treatment plant in the opposite direction from Al-Masheya village.

A groundskeeper with the unenviable job of monitoring the sewage plant’s operations and watching out for wayward children, explained matter-of-factly, “When there is electricity, the smell is not bad. When there is no electricity, the smell starts spreading.”